Hacking State

Roy Barzilai is an independent scholar and author of The Testosterone Hypothesis: How Hormones Regulate the Life Cycles of Civilization and Sex Wars: How Hormones Drive Gender, Race, & Culture Conflicts.

We talked about his hypothesis of how hormones regulate the life cycles of civilization, how the sun effects growth cycles, chronobiology, and individualistic vs. collectivist societies.

As always this show welcomes independent thinkers presenting novel ideas and Roy’s hypothesis represents one of the most interesting and wholistic theories of the rise and fall of civilizations coming from outside mainstream institutions.

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Alex Parsell is a Development professional in major gifts and donor relations at Michigan Radio. We talk about the role of public media coming into the start of the 21st century, the funding of public radio, public media bias, the niche of public radio in the age of internet journalism, what's changed now that everyone can talk, and the difficult problem of maintaining institutional trust in an increasingly noisy information ecology.

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I am joined by Pepperdine University clinical psychology graduate student Victor Rivera (@cognitivicta) to discuss maintaining mental health in quarantine, how to engage with people you disagree with, how to deal with strong political disagreement with those closest to you, the importance of maintaining mental flexibility in conversation, getting through to the ideologically possessed, whether you have responsibility to speak with those you disagree with, and how to stay sane during this tumultuous time.

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James is the president and founder of New Discourses.com, an author, and one the most essential voices for making sense of the absurdity that has become our state of political discourse. Some of you may know him for his pioneering work in the Sokal Squared Hoax. We talk about critical social justice, the intellectual evolution of marxist, postmodern, and postcolonial ideas into intersectionality strain, White fragility, a new social justice encyclopedia, reflexivity, and how to confront creeping identity politics in everyday life.

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I speak with Benjamin A. Boyce, who witnessed firsthand and is documenting the fallout from the Evergreen State College controversy. Boyce is a Youtuber and host of the Boyce of Reason podcast. We talk of how he has evolved through documenting the controversy, Intersectionality, and the wicked problem of moving past tribalism.

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Justin Murphy is a political scientist, political theorist, and author of the new book, "Based Deleuze".

We talk about the life of Gilles Deleuze, what it means that he is based, the Deleuzian concept of Lines of Flight, Disciplinary vs. Control societies, Libertarian Communism, and Diogenes defacing the currency.

You can find Justin's writings at: https://theotherlifenow.com/
On Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfrlXVXz-pT9AmmDELhpyOw
On Twitter: @jmrphy
Other Life podcast: https://jmrphy.libsyn.com/

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I speak with cohosts of the Both/And podcast Jared Janes and Jason Snyder on memetic mediation, the importance of psychological safety in changing minds, metamodernism, the limits of rational systems, Robert Kegan’s 5 stages framework of human development, the extreme reactions to the rise of woke culture, the lonely valley of losing a belief system, holding liminal space, contemplative practices, how enlightenment feels like falling backwards, playfulness, and the praxis Game B.

Both/And: http://bothand.libsyn.com/
Jason Snyder: https://twitter.com/cognazor
Jared Janes: https://twitter.com/JaredJanes

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For our third episode I interrupt our regular scheduled programming to briefly address why I started the show, where our mission stands with regard to upgrading our collective sensemaking, why I believe one-on-one dialogue is the only way through the bottleneck humanity about to face, and what we can borrow from religion, contemplative practices, psychology, cognitive science, and the emerging study of consciousness to have better conversations.

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Jason Crawford runs the blog RootsofProgress.org and is one of the leading luminaries in the emerging discipline of progress studies. Jason’s work at Roots of Progress centers around investigating the crucial technological innovations that have allowed us to come out of the depravity that characterized most of human existence up until very recently. We cover Jason’s views on why the study of human progress is a moral imperative, the prospects of long-term technological and economic stagnation, relatedly, whether all the long-hanging fruit in that regard has been picked, the stalling of important industries from pesticides, to nuclear power, and the relationship between the notion of progress, free will, and agency.

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I speak with evolutionary anthropology "grad student in purgatory" Cody Moser. We cover an array of topics, including: How technology is undermining the substrate culture that got us here, historical relativism vs. universalism, the Incel phenomenon, how metabolic rates effect the growth of cities, the internet and its disruption of universities as the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge, elite overproduction, Adaptationism and The Spandrels of San Marco,
and a number of other areas.

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